Messages - Hamish

Combat is not particularly strategic in Dweller, not something that necessarily needs to change in a light dungeon crawl, but it would be good to offer the player an incentive not to kill monsters by order of proximity. An easy way to present the player with some strategic choices would be to expand the range of monsters and their abilities. The bashing, self healing troll and the multiplying blobs are a nice start, and more creatures with a single unique property would add a simple puzzle like element to clearing dungeons.

Some not particularly original ideas could be:

A thief, that steals a few unequipped items from the player and then scarpers - they could even descend levels of the dungeon if we wanted them to be really annoying. (could be a thieving imp, or ape - the theme doesn’t really matter)

A monster healer, that hangs back and supports the beasties who are up front, doing you damage. (Shaman or witch)

A creature that causes blindness in the player, limiting their vision to the immediately surrounding tiles (A dark spectre perhaps)

A monster that reduces the players XP as well as HP (wraith if you wanted the effect as a melee attack or banshee if you wanted it to be ranged)

A variant on the blobs that are less aggressive but tougher - the AI for these could direct them to block up narrow passages clogging up the players progress.

That’s all I have for the time being, they would help spice things up a bit.

I am playing with the Ranger at the moment and it is fairly enjoyable. I don't seem to find many arrows though and so far have only found marksmans arrows and poison arrows. If they don't already exist, arrows of paralysis, weaken and confusion would add a lot to the rangers effectiveness. If you don't want to litter the game with arrow drops (considering there aren't any monsters that fire arrows, they could be made available through the shop mostly.

They have a bear trap in Legends of yore, and it is quite effective. They are disposable and vanish once the monster breaks loose. It would be better in my opinion to make them a valuable and retrievable item. That way when you use them you would need to finish the monster off to get it back.

How about a thread on game balancing issues? I'm all for making dweller a bit tougher, nothing really masochistic but enough to make me weigh up my options a bit more often. A few tweaks like fewer scrolls of recall would make quite a difference.

'I have not yet decided on exactly how they will work. Will they block further progress through the dungeon or only guard special treasure rooms?' - why not both?

Rather than introduce another playable character I would adjust the ones you already have and make the ranger more roguish if you want to. Dwellers simplicity is something to be preserved.

I think the lighting aspect adds a great deal of character to the game already and has further potential to add variety and strategic choices whilst playing. Its nice to choose between a pendant that increases your attack power and one that expands your field of vision. some other things you could add to play on this mechanic would be scrolls/wands of illumination and Tolkienesque swords that give off light around specific enemy types.

Nothing wrong with hand made! while procedural generation is a worthy cause I think randomly shuffled man made content can be a more direct route to a fun playing experience. I have to say that the coherent dungeon layouts in dweller are quite refreshing after so many PG cave systems.

That map editor looks great - truly useful. If you get round to setting up a user generated content system I'd definitely submit stuff.

There is also nothing wrong with a basic fetch and kill quest system. Dweller is after all a coffee break game. I think what is important is to set up an interesting environment where the player can set themselves challenges. For example, I killed the minotaur in the maze with no trouble at all, but my ranger just cant kill a self healing troll that spawned on the same level. There is no reason why I need to kill him, but I have taken it as a point of honor that he MUST die. I'm going to figure out how to use the environment to my advantage if it kills me.

Before I start I'd like to say how much I am enjoying Dweller. I have found it to be the most accessible, stable and fun roguelike for android. It is also pretty complete in basic features.

A few of the existing features that I think could be enhanced are:

Doors - at present locked doors can be broken down or picked - neither option takes up much time or effects gameplay in the slightest. It would be nice to introduce a simple lock and key mechanic. A single, strategically chosen door on each level could require a key to open, players could then either find the key or bash down the door. If the player decides to bash the door down they would need to repeatedly attack the door which would have a relatively high number of hit points. to spice things up attacking the door could run the risk of dulling your weapon, reducing its quality to 'Worn'. This mechanic could also be applied to many weaker bolted doors on the level.

Wands and magic books - so far in my experience, wands and magic books function for wizards in exactly the same way, except wands have a limited number of charges. There is no incentive for wizards to use most wands if he has the equivalent spell book. A slight improvement on this might be to have wands behave differently for wizards than for rangers or warriors. For example a wand of fire would have a larger area of effect in the hands of a wizard as opposed to targeting a single enemy when used by a ranger. A wand of teleport would allow a wizard to select exactly where he wanted to go to on a level. This would make wands a more precious resource to manage when playing as a wizard.

Lights - the effect of lighting on the game is nice but could be made more pronounced on some levels. This could be done by reducing the visual range by one square and having all light sources start out as extinguished. The player would then travel around the level lighting lamps as they find them, revealing there surroundings as they go.

Yeah I Liked it for sure. Its very enjoyable to have a different dungeon layout to explore and I think the maze pattern works well. Are those randomly generated by the way?

One suggestion would be to move the entrance to the side branch onto the starting forest level. It could become unlocked as a result of a small quest (finding an item at a certain depth of the main dungeon or somesuch) I think side branches would be more manageable and expandable if you used this system and it would also give more purpose to the starting area and quest sytem.